


Concerning the Sky

by oneinspats



Category: Pirates of the Caribbean (Movies)
Genre: Childhood, Gen, concerning Mr Mercer's childhood
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-03-11
Updated: 2014-03-11
Packaged: 2018-01-15 08:24:35
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 687
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1298089
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/oneinspats/pseuds/oneinspats
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>RE: Things that are not important unless you give them importance. Also, mind the elderly, do not bother prostitutes, and do not speak with witches. </p><p>- </p><p>Enter a boy who is no more than seven. He can’t sign his name and doesn’t know when he was born. At some point in the near future his mother is going to die in a bar fight. He is going to be sitting at the counter and he is going to watch.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Concerning the Sky

Enter a boy who is no more than seven. He can’t sign his name and doesn’t know when he was born. At some point in the near future his mother is going to die in a bar fight. He is going to be sitting at the counter and he is going to watch.

Someone will say, after she dies, ‘ought to ‘ave bin some mercy in this here world. Wot fer her lad an’ all’. And the boy will just say, sort of, ‘wot does mercy mean?’

It will be an innocent question.

 

 

Later. A time and a time later that boy will be a young man and he will be in London. A prison guard will give him a page from the Bible and will teach him how to read. The prison guard will die with his own gun held to his head by the young man who can now sign his name.

 

A man will meet another man. One is a lord, the other is decidedly _not._ The lord will ask, ‘work for me?’ The man will reply, ‘do you pay well?’

Above them the sky will be blue. Around them the moors will be grey.

  

The lord, one day after they know each other a bit better, will ask, ‘why do you look after that family?’

And he will explain that this is the only way he can repay the man who taught him how to write. And how do you really do that, my lord? Repay the person who spelled your name out and traced your hand over it so you knew what signs meant _you._

 

His lord has eyes that are blue. They remind him of the sky.

 

A witch in northern England will meet a man and she will say, ‘your lord sent you’. He will only nod. Because she is a witch and the things his mum taught him before she went on her bloody and brutal way were: mind the elderly, don’t harass the prostitutes, and never speak in front of a witch.

 

The witch, whose last name is Device, will laugh and nod and drop hot wax into cold water. She will read it and say, ‘mind the ocean. Mind the heart. Yours and the others. Mind your lord. Mind the sky. Would you like a poppet?’

 

He will nod.

 

She will give him one and will explain that because he wants it that is how it is important. Witchcraft is just like prayin’, she will say. Most of the hard work is on you.

 

 

He does not mind the ocean. He will never mind the ocean.

 

 

At some point he will dream of his lord being a suddenly headless man. He will dream of dying without breath. Of cold Atlantic bearing down heavy and rough on top of them both. His lord, once he tells him of this dream, will laugh and say that prophetic dreams are things of tales and children’s stories.

‘Though we’re sort of in one, aren’t we?’ He will ask because he will be impertinent with his lord and his lord will never mind.

‘Yes, and I am thinking we currently have a one in a million chance of success which means we are bound to do just that.’  
  


Later that night he will dream again. The ocean is a black pit and at the bottom is a blue sky. When he wakes he will search for the poppet. He will not find it. He will think that maybe, by chance, it has fallen over into grasping water. His little poppet with the wax and the green cloth for clothes and the little bit of string around its neck.

  

He will ask his lord, the last day they will see each other alive, Sir, can you explain the brutality of the world we live in?

 

And his lord will not be able to even though the sun will be so very hot and the sky will be so very blue.

 

 

When he dies he will wonder, I ought to have marked the blue-ness of the sky. I feel that it was important, somehow.


End file.
